Site Areas – Decide Which Results Are Most Important

AddSearch allows you to curate search results by increasing or decreasing the importance of certain site areas by URL patterns. For example, you can decide to boost your product pages higher in the search results and lower the importance of your press releases.

Picture of Site areas user interface in AddSearch dashboard.

To set up site area weights:

  1. Log in to the AddSearch Dashboard and go to Site areas.
  2. To boost all pages in the search results that reside in /products/, you can just input /products/ into the text field and select a weight higher than 100%, say 150%. Conversely, if you want to reduce the importance of an area, select a weight under 100%.
  3. Site area weights are applied in real-time after they are saved. The only exception is exclusions, that require a re-crawl. You can wait until the normal re-crawl has run, or you can re-index individual URLs or all of your documents from the Dashboard’s Index tools page.

Please note that these patterns will be matched against URLs in the order they are listed. Arrange the list so that the highest priority patterns are on the top and don’t put too generic URL paths above specific ones.

Site area weights are wildcards by default. Site areas can be defined with regular expressions with a regex: prefix. For example regex:.*contact-us$ would match all the URLs ending with contact-us.

This feature has been designed so that there’s as little maintenance as possible for you as the site owner. When creating new content, you don’t need to worry about how it’ll appear in the search; once you’ve decided your weight rules, you’re all set.

Defining weight with a meta tag

It’s also possible to define the relative importance of a page with the following meta tag:

<meta name="addsearch-boost" content="120" />

Tag’s content is the importance in percentage with the default value 100 (meaning 100%). Value “50” would give the page half score, and “200” would double page’s score. If “addsearch-boost” meta tag is used, it overrides other possibly matching Site area rules.

Curate results with specific keywords

To make sure that specific search results are shown with manually defined search terms, use our Pinned results feature.